I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for...
I wondered if what one normally calls normal was itself a sort of dullness, a deadening of sense and spirit, if not, indeed, a very closure of their doors. For myself, now, liberated, released, emerg...
I went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, Hello!...
I was half-afraid that I would do something awful, like faint or fart right in front of the queen, but all went well.
I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, You’re in the papers. There was a ver...
I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the...
I have no words for that feeling, nor had I ever had it before, which comes from the knowledge that one is far away from all humanity, alone in a thousand square miles. We rode in silence, for speech...
I had returned to piano-playing and music lessons when I had turned seventy-five (having written about how even older people can learn new skills, I thought it was time to take my own advice).
I found the Guam visit very important at a human level, too. While the postencephalitic patients had been put away for decades, living in a hospital, often abandoned by their families, people with lyt...
He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.
Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip have done a great service in making these so readily available to us in The Deaf Experience. Especially moving and important are the 1779 Observations of Pierre Desloge...
Grasshoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates.
Gooddy refers here to personal time, as contrasted with clock time, and the extent to which personal time departs from clock time may become almost unbridgeable with the extreme bradykinesia common in...
For ‘wellness’, naturally, is no cause for complaint – people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill – not well. Unless, as George Eliot...
Edelman, who once planned to be a concert violinist, uses musical metaphors as well. In a BBC radio interview, he said: Think: if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quart...
Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a narrative and is defined by this narrative.
Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, inner speech, and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,
Deaf, signing parents will babble to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant’s brain is especially attuned to...
But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in twenty or thirty seconds, even though it see...
But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to A...